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Read Excel files in pure C# without interop. It can read worksheets in a workbook and read cells in a worksheet. It can acquire cell content (text, number, datetime, or error) and cell format (font, alignment, linestyle, background, etc.). It can also read pictures in the file, get information of image size, position, data, and format.

The focus of this month’s Office Space column is to introduce the fundamental building blocks you’ll use to create business solutions with WSS (Windows SharePoint Services) and MOSS (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server). I explain what a WSS "feature" is and show you how to build one that automates the creation of new lists and document libraries within a site. Along the way I add a custom application page to the custom business solution. This contains the Visual Basic code needed to generate Word documents from data within SharePoint lists and save these documents within a SharePoint document library.

How to perform scanning, rearranging, OCR and Outlook export of documents for a paperless future - or at least a tidy desktop.

A library to parse and evaluate Excel-style formulas and recalculate in natural order

You can create reports in many ways, with or without Excel. If you look only at reporting solutions that use Excel, the list roughly gets narrowed down to three:

• SQL Reporting Services
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the 2007 Microsoft Office System (VSTO)
• Server-side Excel Automation

Of course you can imagine more solutions, but in essence they will not deviate much from the above list. In this article, I'll first look at SQL Reporting Services and VSTO to examine their plusses and minuses, and then I'll take a detailed look at why and how you would build a server-side solution.

Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the 2007 Microsoft Office System is more powerful than ever, allowing you to create add-ins for Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, Visio, and InfoPath.

If you want to create your own professional looking tabs and controls in Office, check out the RibbonX API of the 2007 Microsoft Office system.